Area 51

About Area 51

Area 51 (1995) is Mesa Logic's light-gun shooter for Atari Games, a last-ditch bid to save the struggling company that critics found dated but players made a 20,000-cabinet hit.

Area 51 in Depth

As a member of the STAAR team, alongside Lieutenant Stephanie Grant and Sergeant Major Marcus Bradley, the player fights through a warehouse, tunnels and other parts of the Area 51 facility to trigger its nuclear self-destruct, gunning down genetically altered zombie soldiers and the alien Kronn without hitting teammates. Shooting nothing but three STAAR members switches the game to Kronn Hunter mode, in which the player becomes a Kronn hunter sent to eliminate the rebels.

The player starts with a semi-automatic pistol and can shoot upgrade targets for a machine gun, a pump shotgun and finally an automatic shotgun; the shotguns give a wider margin for error and the automatics fire while the trigger is held, but any hit drops the player back to the pistol. Up to nine grenades, hidden in crates and bonus rooms, clear most enemies on screen, and flammable boxes and barrels can be shot to blow up nearby foes. Shooting certain objects in the right order opens shooting exercises, weapon stashes and bonus items, and other back doors warp ahead to later levels.

Making Area 51

In 1994 Atari Games had gone years without a profitable game and lost many developers to Electronic Arts. It asked Ed Logg for a light-gun game, but he too left for EA with his game, Bounty Hunter, unfinished. Atari handed the project to Robert Weatherby's Mesa Logic, which found Bounty Hunter underwhelming and pitched its own concept instead. Lead programmer Charlie Grisafi dropped plans to stream video from CD, which could only produce a letterboxed picture, in favour of a hard drive and his own compression software.

Time Warner Interactive released it under the Atari Games label in 1995. Next Generation said it "provides shooters with what they want" but compared it with older games rather than the current crop, and critics often judged it inferior to Virtua Cop 2. Players disagreed: it sold over 20,000 cabinets and was cited as the first step in Atari Games' recovery from near collapse. Midway released PlayStation, Saturn and Windows versions in 1996, and Atari followed it with Maximum Force and Area 51: Site 4.